Good morning!
New Money: Education startup EverFi has raised a giant new round of funding from Rise, social impact fund managed by TPG Growth. A few notes, via my colleague Robert Hackett:
- This the third-largest ever “ed tech” deal, aside from German publishing giant Bertelsmann’s $230 million stake in HotChalk and a $200 million fundraising by TutorGroup, an Alibaba-backed English tutoring startup.
- This is the first deal for Rise, which contributed $120 million to the round. TPG Growth contributed $30 million, alongside new investor L.A.-based MainStreet Advisors.
- Big names: Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and Evan Williams are existing investors in EverFi. Meanwhile Rise was co-founded by TPG Growth’s Bill McGlashan, Bono and Jeff Skoll. The fund’s board includes Laurene Powell Jobs, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, Lynne Benioff, and Pierre Omidyar.
- Hackett reports that company “has not, at this stage, hit that oft-vaunted billion-dollar milestone.”
- Read more about Rise’s social good strategy – don’t call it philanthropy! – right here.
Where are they now? Updates on a pair of Term Sheet scoops:
Robinhood, which we reported was raising a big round of funding that valued the company at over $1 billion, has closed that round with a valuation of $1.3 billion. More details on the deal below.
And Yik Yak, which we reported was for sale earlier this month, has sold in a talent acquisition to Square for just $3 million, according to Bloomberg.
The future of TV: The TV Upfronts, and their digital version, the NewFronts, are coming up next month. To catch you up before the news deluge, check out my colleague Michal Levram’s feature story on Hulu, which notes that “Hulu’s hybrid nature and its hesitance to shake up its parents’ business models help explain why it’s currently the ‘oh, yeah, I forgot about them’ player in streaming services.” Now, the company is pushing into live TV.
Relevant to Term Sheet readers: It’s not always wise for private equity firms and strategic investors to invest alongside one another. Levram writes:
[Hulu’s] unusual ownership consortium had its drawbacks. The TV partners not only were fierce rivals, but didn’t want to make moves that could threaten their other revenue streams; the PE folks wanted a fast return on their investment. “We the owners were not fully aligned on what the future should be,” admits Kevin Mayer, Disney’s chief strategy officer and a Hulu board member. The partnership got more awkward after cable giant Comcast took a majority share in NBCUniversal in 2011. One condition regulators placed on the deal was that Comcast could be only a silent partner in Hulu. As a result, NBCUniversal had to relinquish its board seat, and Comcast execs were forbidden from even talking to other Hulu owners about the startup.
Around that same time, rumors were circulating that an IPO was imminent, and several companies expressed interest in buying Hulu. But the media giants decided to hold on to their baby. Providence, reportedly frustrated with the outcome, asked for and got a buyout. (The firm declined to speak with Fortune.) Its departure left Hulu completely media owned.
Meanwhile, this week Hulu’s cord-cutting peer Netflix announced it is raising €1 billion in new debt for content acquisitions, capital expenditures, investments, working capital and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions.
Fun fact about Netflix: The company has never once made an acquisition. Not for talent. Not for tech. Other tech companies of its size ($66 billion) and age (20 years) have done dozens of deals. Not Netflix. In 2008, the company made a single tiny investment in Roku. So, expect that debt to be used for content acquisitions, not M&A.
The one area Netflix might consider an acquisition would be internationally. (For more on the company’s big global push, read Levram’s profile on the company from last year.) But even there, Netflix is getting creative there with partnerships like the one it is reportedly about to strike with with Baidu in China.
Antitrust: I’ve been thinking a lot about this recent New York Times op-ed on whether Google, Facebook and Amazon have monopolies that should be broken up. There are a quite a few weird and just plain wrong points in this article. But I’m not as convinced the premise is entirely flawed, from this perspective: It is nearly impossible to live in the developed world as a modern human without using the services of five companies: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Has anyone ever made a stronger case for why these companies might actually warrant antitrust scrutiny?
• Why cash is going out of style, and the perils of a cashless economy.
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• Oyo Rooms, an India-based online hotel booking platform, raised $250 million in funding, according to the Economic Times. Read more.
• EverFi, a Washington D.C.-based learning and education technology platform, raised $190 million in Series D funding. Rise, a newly established social impact investing fund managed by TPG Growth, led the round, and was joined by TPG Growth and MainStreet Advisors. Existing investors Advance Publications, Rethink Impact, Allen & Co, Jeff Bezos. Read more at Fortune.
• Robinhood, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based stock trading app, raised $110 million in Series C funding from DST Global, Greenoaks Capital and Thrive Capital. Existing investors Index Ventures, NEA, and Ribbit Capital participated. The deal values the…